The drink had probably gone tepid by this point, but I’d caught him downing it countless times over the years. Apparently, its muscle-relaxing properties sometimes helped to alleviate migraines stemming from tension. Nothing comparedto actual pain meds, but when you had none to spare, you did the best with what you had.
I angled my face toward the sun, enjoying how it warmed my skin, drained of the lingering numbness since we’d entered Conall’s house. “Finish this, and I will drive us the rest of the way home.”
His knuckles brushed against my own, and then calloused fingers dipped between mine, twining our limbs together, the act so unexpected yet gentle I shuddered.
All I’d been daydreaming of was coming true. It terrified me more than the prospect of losing the two people I’d exchanged blood with during the blooming war.
Gedeon’s thumb stroked mine. “Thank you.”
If not for the wind retreating, leaving stillness in its absence, I would’ve missed his quiet murmur. He typically ordered, commanded routinely, and as a general rule, avoided any expressions of gratitude, too petrified of exposing his weaknesses.
“What do you think will happen?” I crossed one ankle over the other, the car’s frame chilly under my back, as cold as I’d have to be on the morning we set off to Ilasall. “Can we actually win this?”
He sipped the tea. Once. Twice. “I do not know.”
“What if… What if there’s no future for us after the following few days have come and gone? What if a hundred hours is all we have left?”
“Then it will be enough.” He tipped the thermos upside down to gulp the last dregs of the peppermint drink. Steel shined in the daylight, the utter opposite of how the ink forming a forest and crawling around his forearm absorbed the sunshine. “I would give up forever to have one more hour—even asecondwith you, Zion. But if that turned out to be impossible, just knowing you lived would be enough for me.”
His words dripped down my front like honey, viscous and thick, a balm smoothing out the raised scars littering my torso from innumerable battles, the burn marks on my left forearm, the tattoo on my right.
Ilasall might’ve viewed us as evil, promoted such a lie behind its wall, but the seven people in charge—the Heads of Health, Welfare, Education, Nutriment, Labor, Military, and the Head of Ilasall—had forgotten one essential truth: villains weren’t born. They were forged.
If the city wished to call our trio heinous, wicked, immoral, ignoble, malevolent, or anything worse, it was welcome to do so. We would proudly carve the verbal bites into our skin to bear for eternity.
Because yes, the three of us were fractured, uneven, rough, but there wasn’t a person who was not. And war…
A certainty of shattering a person to pieces, to dust motes, to air particles drifting in the depths of nothingness.
I could attest to that. It’d taken me twelve years—almost thirteen in a few months—a woman with a level of viciousness so high nothing could stop her, and a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders to finally see the light from the bottom of the well I’d been stuck in.
Slow stomps on the asphalt gave away Kali’s return from the bathroom break. Imprints of our jackets she’d rested her head on during her nap colored her cheeks in pinkish lines.
Gedeon screwed the cap of the now empty thermos back on. “Ready to get back on the road?”
“My tailbone hurts like hell, but we can go.” Pulling our jackets from the backseat, she began folding them into one neat bundle.
Gedeon gripped the open door. “What are you doing?”
She turned my jacket over, hiding the zipper beneath the worn leather. “Making you a pillow.”
Such a smart birdie. So lovely, I wished I could run her a bath and wash her wings, feather by feather.
“I don’t know how to drive, so I’ll sit in the front.” She patted the makeshift pillow. “And you can sleep here.”
Softness merged with…somethingmorein Gedeon’s expression.
I clapped his shoulder. “Dream about us,” I said, then hopped into the driver’s seat, Kali climbing in beside me.
Left with no other choice, Gedeon sunk into the backseat. Before our car even rumbled to life, he’d already spread out as much as possible in the small space, his head resting on the cushioning Kali had arranged.
I threw him the extra t-shirt I’d plucked out of the trunk. “To cover your eyes.”
For a minute, he ignored the blue fabric nestled on his abdomen. “Why are you so nice to me?” He scrunched up the cotton. “I have done nothing but hurt you.”
“You have done more than you think.” Shifting into first gear, I pulled back onto the road. “You just refuse to see it.”
If not for him, I probably would’ve died on thousands of occasions.
